TCH: Terrain Types and Tiny Adventures

I did a quick search of my blog and it turns out, somehow, I’ve never written about or even mentioned Dungeons & Dragons Tiny Adventures. For some time, there was a FaceBook game to help promote Fourth Edition, and I can only assume that it was pulled for being more popular than the tabletop game. [/snark]

One of the things that’s cool about it is how the terrain effects what kind of abilities are called for — well, kind of, anyway. It had eight terrain types, four natural (forest, lake, mountain, swamp) and four constructed (castle, dungeon, graveyard, temple). I only noticed this afternoon that they’re nearly balanced among their abilities.

(If only the dungeon terrain type favored Armor Class instead of Intelligence. No, it had to favor Intelligence like the castle terrain and be redundant.)

Really, why I brought this up at all was because I was going through them and trying to figure out how to assign abilities to the terrain types I came up with based on boards using The Settlers of Catan. I went and made this big, complicated chart and then I remembered that I’d color-coded everything and was making it way too difficult.

Peaks (red) share STR with Hills, and CON with MarshesHills (orange) share STR with Peaks, and CHA with PlainsPlains (yellow) share CHA with Hills, and DEX with WoodsWoods (green) share DEX with Plains, and WIS with ShoalsShoals (blue) share WIS with Woods, and INT with MarshesMarshes (violet) share INT with Shoals, and CON with Peaks

Considering Catan also includes a desert/wasteland, or depending on which of the expansions you’re using, up to three, I figure the wastes are liable to challenge a character’s abilities equally. Anyway, this should serve as a guide when characters explore the wild, and will probably form the foundation of the Quest system.